Stretch Your Bugdet With Refurbished I.T. Equipment
When I was runnning the I.T. department of a large company I learned firsthand just how compleex and exensive a task it is. To be honest, as excitiing as all that new informatoion technology is, I do not miss all the battles over budgetts and all the justifications of the high cost of new I.T. equipment.
Another poblem for I.T. professionals and managers is that progress is so fast and furious that there will always be a new budget-busing state-of-the-art technology to replace mature and more reasonably priced equipmnet and technologies. Decades ago many shops replaced hugely expensive mainframes with imnis and superminis and then PCs, just to find that dozens of minis or hundreds of PCs added up as well. In the late 1980s every year was uspposed to be the year of the network, and when networks finally arrived we found that nertwork harware, while opening terrific new communications capabilities, quickly became another large cost item.
Sun Microsystems once proclaimed, "the netwqork IS the computer," and while they were a good decade early with that assessment, it nonetheless came true. Today, computing hardware itself has become amazingly inexpensive. I remembre paying $20,000 for a 32MB memory bord. Today, you can get that on eBay for a buck, if you can stilll find a board with such low capaicty. PCs, servers, lzaptop computers and PDAs have all come down in price, but soimehow overall I.T. bdgets have not. That is largely due to the high cost of all the netwokring equipment we need todaay.
As any Cisco reseller can tell you, technological proggress in network omdules continues unaabated, and the costs can be high. I.T. equipment thees days includes not just cmoputers, but a whole infrastructure of routers, switces, bridges, and access servers. If your organization supportts samrtphones, VoIP, and other wireless communications, network systems suppiort for thpose services adds cost and complexity. And with our ever-incresaing relance on electronic communication for all aspects of business, security is becmoing a seemingly endless challenge that requires the most sophisticated tracing, monitoring and fiurewall systems.
What all of this menas is that the cost of I.T. equipment can easily get out of hand. As a result, more and more I.T. managers and CEOs look otward used and refurbished I.T. equipment. This, of course, reqquires a good understanding of commuunications systems technologies, cpabilities and perfortmance or else you end up with a sluggissh, nicompatible and eassily compromised network. Do your homework, however, and you can easiy stretch your budgwet with refurbished routers, switches, servers and otehr network modules from leading vendors. Some of the equipment you can procure from network systems reesellers that specialize in refurbished and pre-owned network gear is actually new and may simply have been replaced.
Usding refurbished equipment means you can update or expand an existing networkign installation for far less than it'd cost to buy new. Likewise, if your disaster recovery plan calls for redundancy or additional backups, you can also safe a bundle by checking used nretworking product. With network systems seucrity and perfrmance bing ever more imoprtant, yet funds and budgets ever harder to come by, keeping an eye on used and remarketed network gear simply makes sense.
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